With a little more than a week to go in the US presidential election campaign, Joe Biden maintains a steady lead over President Donald Trump. For all the shocks and instability of 2020, Biden’s lead has been remarkably steady. Few races in recent history have been this stable. In late October 2019, the average of polls on the RealClearPolitics site, had Biden at 50 percent and Trump at 43 percent. A year later, the same average had Biden at 51 percent and Trump at 42.5 percent. During tha

Octavia Butler’s classic futurist novel “Parable of the Sower” recently made the New York Times bestseller list for the first time. It depicts an America falling apart at the seams due to violence, economic decline, and governmental dysfunction. But despite the chaos, the protagonist, Lauren Olamina, spends much of her time thinking about space exploration. Faced with a dystopian Earth, she motivates herself and her followers to survive by dreaming of the stars. Today, the US

An old Chinese saying goes: Cook the dog after catching the hare. This may be applied to the current turmoil in the state prosecution organization involving Prosecutor-General Yoon Suk-youl and Chief Prosecutor Han Dong-hoon who now face open pressure from Justice Minister Choo Mi-ae to leave the service. During the early days of the Moon Jae-in presidency, Yoon and Han were used as the warriors of law in the new administration’s purges on what were left over from the past conservative a

There are a myriad of enigmatic things happening in Korea these days, whether in the North or the South. For example, North Korea confuses us by showing us a friendly gesture recently, while displaying deadly weapons that can strike the South in a military parade. In South Korea, too, we are witnessing a plethora of sphinxlike things of late One of the inscrutable things in South Korea is the recent tendency of political parties to change their names continually. In fact, this phenomenon of pol

If Joe Biden enters the White House on the afternoon of Jan. 20, there is reason to expect that intraparty conflicts will come racing to the fore: between the Democratic left and Democratic moderates; between multicultural, debt-laden youth and Whiter, more affluent, suburbanites; between the alternate Sanders/AOC ticket and the actual Biden/Harris ticket. It’s also possible that Biden might succeed in having an awful lot of his political cake and eating it, too. US politics has changed

Kastellorizo is one of those places that might become a cause for war even though most people couldn’t find it on a map. The combatants would be Greece and Turkey, formally NATO “allies” but in reality perennial foes since the sloppy unraveling of the Ottoman Empire. And their war would be less about the island as such than about the Mediterranean waters said to belong to it. That’s because underneath the sea bed, there may be lots of oil and gas. Kastellorizo derives

  For governments facing a growing wave of coronavirus cases as fall turns to winter, there’s a stark lesson in Saturday’s stunning election victory for New Zealand’s incumbent Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern: Voters really want their governments to suppress the pandemic. A landslide victory means Ardern could govern with the first outright majority since her country adopted proportional representation in the 1990s, with her Labour party on track to win the largest share of

In 1989 I was a captain in the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment stationed in West Germany. Our regiment patrolled a stretch of the Iron Curtain that divided democracies and dictatorships. That November, the Berlin Wall fell and the Iron Curtain parted. The United States and the free world had triumphed over communist totalitarianism without firing a shot. The Soviet Union soon broke apart. Just over a year later, those same cavalry troopers helped kick Saddam Hussein’s army out of Kuwait. In

India’s COVID-19 economic gloom turned into despair last week, on news that its per capita gross domestic product may be lower for 2020 than in neighboring Bangladesh. “Any emerging economy doing well is good news,” Kaushik Basu, a former World Bank chief economist, tweeted after the International Monetary Fund updated its World Economic Outlook. “But it’s shocking that India, which had a lead of 25 percent five years ago, is now trailing.” Ever since it beg

An unseasonal cold snap did little to deter hundreds of people, young and old, from taking in the enchanting view of Gyeongbokgung at night on Wednesday. The colorful dancheong that decorate the palace buildings seemed to shimmer in the warm glow of the lights and the trees that have weathered numerous changes of seasons, illuminated from below, seemed to come to life. “This is the first time in my life that I am here at night,” I overheard a woman tell her friend as they kept thei

Remember in June when China called a halt to purchases of US soybeans and then stopped buying US soybeans? Or last year, when China blocked imports of Australian coal and then stopped buying Australian coal? Yeah, me neither. That’s the way to think about Beijing’s latest “ban” on Australian coal. China has suspended purchases and told power stations and steel mills to stop using product sourced from its trading partner, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg New

The news of the death of famed feminist scholar and activist Lee Hyo-jae last week brought back a memory from the early 1980s. I met her briefly at the house of a friend of mine, where she was hiding, in the wake of the civil uprising in Gwangju. She was among the pro-democracy intellectuals wanted by the Chun Doo-hwan regime, which had concocted a case against them for supporting the then opposition politician Kim Dae-jung’s “sedition and conspiracy.” It was a precarious tim

Recently, a friend of mine sent me a summary of Dr. In Yohan’s speech on the current situation of South Korea. Dr. In, also known as John Linton, is the son of an American missionary who built churches, schools and hospitals here before South Korea began its modernization. Dr. In is a renowned medical doctor and professor who loves South Korea so much that he has lived here all his life. According to the summary, Dr. In visited North Korea some time ago. In the car headed for Pyongyang, h

Shares of Big Hit Entertainment, the company behind South Korean boy band BTS, begin trading this week. A top-of-the-range IPO valuation of $4.2 billion implies rock-star earnings multiples. Institutional investors have piled in anyway, displaying impressive confidence in the staying power of ultra-groomed youths and their obsessive followers. To live up to the hype, billionaire founder Bang Si-hyuk needs to turn a one-band wonder into something closer to Universal Music Group, adding artists a

Small wars can tell you a lot about the biggest geopolitical and military issues of the day. Consider the present conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh. Most Americans have probably never heard of that disputed region in the Caucasus. But the fighting there reveals key fault lines in an increasingly disordered global environment, and it underscores crucial trends in the evolution of modern warfare. In some ways, there is nothing new about what is happening in Nagorno-Ka